When you hear children read aloud and there is a slow, staccato, and halting quality to their reading, we say that the child lacks fluency. At schools, teachers may say that a child is doing fine when he or she is reading grade-level books with a reasonable degree of accuracy. However, reading isn't functional when it's simply accurate. Those accurate words may have come with effort. Fluency is when children read words without a trace of effort. Speed and accuracy together equal fluency.

Fluency is most important in silent reading, which is how most of us read, but reading aloud offers clues that fluency has been achieved. Reading aloud effortlessly, fluidly, and with appropriate phrasing and intonation, are indicators that a reader is fluent. So are a desire to read, enjoyment of it, and understanding what has been read. Have you ever listened to a child read so slowly and with such effort that you could barely follow the story? That child lacks fluency.

There are two main reasons for any of us to read - for information and for enjoyment. Whether we read school books to do our work, instructional manuals to gain a new skill, directions on signs when we need to find something, rules for a game we want to play, or a compelling book that a friend recommends, comprehension is always the goal. And comprehension is very difficult to achieve without fluency.

Except in cases of receptive language disorder, comprehension can be achieved when several variables exist. The first is a reasonable command of content. We'd not expect children to read and understand a social studies chapter about continents if they hadn't first studied towns, states, countries and oceans. Without content-building and a frame of reference, a child could not comprehend, even if the words could be easily read.

Another requirement for comprehension is that the material is presented in a clear and organized manner. Even a simple story is not understandable if it's not presented well. On the other hand, principles of quantum physics can be understood by non-scientists if the material is presented in a clear enough manner that meets the reader at his or her own level of knowledge.

When these criteria are met, and in the absence of a receptive language disorder, comprehension will occur as long as children can read accurately and automatically. Fluently. It's our goal at Ravinia Reading Center - to teach your children to attain fluency so that they may comprehend, when all the other variables line up.

Not that anything's wrong with comprehension instruction. All children should receive direct instruction in comprehension strategies. Children need to learn how to monitor their own comprehension; how to slow down and/or re-read when the going gets tough. Children also need to learn to facilitate their own comprehension by actively practicing strategies like integrating ideas and making mental summaries. I've always thought that instruction in comprehension strategies is best if carried out by your child's classroom teacher, using curriculum materials, during the school day.

Fluency, as you might be thinking by now, can and should be fostered and encouraged at all levels of mastery. I like to take our youngest students and teach in what I call a small universe where true mastery can be accomplished even in beginning settings. For a child who has the basics of phonemic awareness, and has been directly taught the sounds for short a and s, f, m, h, n, r, l, d, t, g, p as well as the sight words "is" and "the," he or she can read, albeit in a small universe - The rat is mad! Success. With enough practice using well-designed materials and the opportunity to read engaging storybooks such as The Rod, Sid and his Mom, and A Hat for Nan, fluency, even in that small universe, can be achieved. Some years later, the same child would be fluent at a different level if he or she could read Harry Potter with accuracy and speed. Comprehension would accompany fluency at either of these levels because we know those books have content appropriate to their learning levels and are written well.

 

How Is Fluency Achieved?

Reading, as we continue to discover, requires a remarkably complex set of skills. Each of its steps are necessary but not sufficient. Reading is a vast web and cannot be mastered without all its interjoined components. It's really surprising that any of us master it.

Research has shown us that the primary strategy that skilled readers use to read words is through sounding them out - each letter - although it eventually happens simultaneously. Children actually become skilled fluent readers one word at a time. Each word for a child starts out as a work-in-progress. You see it in children. When they don't quite know a word yet, they seem to know it once and then they don't. When they know more about the word, they can read it, but perhaps slowly. After they correctly decode the word enough times, they will read it fast, without effort, automatically. It's almost as if that word moves over to another part of the brain and once there is recognized instantly, as though it's etched in stone. For each child it's a different amount of exposure that accomplishes this.

Fluency has become a hot topic among some educators. The activity most associated with fluency is called Repeated Oral Reading. This is when a child is asked to read the same material multiple times. It's an essential component of any good therapy and should always be included in reading instruction. Here's the caveat: repeated reading won't work unless we also fully address the other more foundational components of reading instruction.

Elaine K. McEwan, author of Teach Them All to Read: Catching the Kids Who Fall Through the Cracks has written a whole chapter on fluency. I recommend it. One of the sections is called A Dozen Plus Ways to Do Repeated Oral Reading. McEwan gives excellent suggestions such as repeating back some of the sentences that your child read, the way they would be spoken. By doing this you are modeling, making the connection between the text and spoken language, and fostering fluency.

I have seen practitioners try to jump to fluency, using repeated oral reading as the main component of their reading instruction. It's not sufficient. If the child is still relying somewhat on memorization and guessing , rather than decoding, they're not learning a transferable skill. The words they are reading will not become permanently etched into their brains. Rather, their brains will store incomplete and sketchy models of the words. And so, the next time they see words they once seemed to know, they might not even be able to get them right.

 

What Are These Components?

Over the last five years, our understanding of the way reading is learned has exploded. Functional MRI has exponentially increased our knowledge of where the brain and reading intersect. It's almost hard to keep up. The report of the National Reading Panel found that systematic, well-organized phonics instruction was the one that produced the most significant benefit to those who have difficulty reading AND to kindergarteners through sixth graders in general. Their recommendations are evidence based; they came after reviewing tens of thousands of research articles.

Here then are the five essential components of effective reading instruction - phonemic awareness; phonics; fluency; vocabulary; and instruction in comprehension strategies. This is how I like to define the other components:

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and play with individual sounds in spoken words. To demonstrate a relatively early level of phonemic awareness, we might ask a young child to segment by saying all of the separate sounds in the word "map," or blend by asking the child what word we're trying to say when we say the sounds /m/ /a/ /t/.

Phonics is the relationship between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language. It's more than the knowledge that the letter B makes a /b/ sound. Readers must also know the rules that letters must follow. Why is R-A-T pronounced "rat" instead of "rate?" This is but one example of what children need to be taught in order to read.

Fluency, again, is rate and accuracy in reading. Neither is useful without the other. When fluency is tested, the score is reported as correct words per minute.

The final two components of reading instruction are vocabulary and comprehension.

Vocabulary is the words people must know to communicate effectively.

Comprehension is the ability to understand and gain meaning from what has been read.

Phonemic awareness and phonics training precede fluency in instructional sequence and so they must be taught before and then accompany fluency training.

Remember from the section in this manual called The Struggle to Read - A Primer, that Dr. Reid Lyon says that only for a lucky five percent of children is this a journey without effort, but for at least 20 to 30 percent of students, that reading will be one of the most difficult tasks they will encounter in their schooling.

We tend to work with the 20 to 30 percent for whom Dr. Reid says it is the hardest - overwhelmingly difficult. The steps are really the same as for any reader, but it takes longer. Each of the steps to success for our students is elongated. Whereas a classmate may learn a new principle very quickly, we must break down each principle into smaller units and offer different ways of looking at it. Furthermore, our students must practice more. We cannot predict for any student how many times a particular skill must be practiced to be mastered. And we cannot predict, even once a skill is mastered, how long it will take for any particular word to move over to that automatic category.

Sally Shaywitz, M.D., author of Overcoming Dyslexia, says that "fluency is elusive to the dyslexic child but need not be. And so it is particularly urgent that the dyslexic child who has gained some degree of reading accuracy but still reads slowly and hesitantly receive ongoing fluency training. The goal is for your dyslexic child to become a fluent reader."

These children are a hard working group and their determination is inspiring.

 

How Do We Know It's Working?

We measure students' progress weekly and, over time, we can document it. We are careful not to focus on the ups and downs within a larger progression. It tends to take about 20 weeks to see authentic progress. Whether progress looks good in a short burst or not as good, the data at earlier than 20 weeks is not reliable.

In addition to our methods of internal evaluation, we constantly hear stories from parents that indicate success.

Parents tell us all the time that their children are choosing to read for pleasure for the very first time. One parent even thanked me for the 15 minutes of peace she now enjoys at bedtime. Her two children now settle themselves in their rooms before bed...and read.

Another common piece of feedback from parents is that children are doing their homework, accurately, without help, for the first time. Many families have had to assist with homework from the beginning of their child's school career.

We have heard more than once about sixth and seventh grade students selecting a birthday card for someone they care about for the very first time. Taking and passing the written driving exam independently despite being told that it would never ever happen. Fulfilling a dream to pursue acting and feeling confident that they can read the lines by signing up for high school theater. Finally knowing what it feels like to be able to participate in a religious service at the age of sixteen.

One mom recently arrived back home after attending a late night meeting. She was greeted by the beaming face of her 12-year old son. "Mom! I can read the stats on the back of my baseball cards!" We've just heard that he's now reading the sports section. We get calls like this all of the time. It's all music to our ears, as it's why we're here.